Without a Bad Boy

[click the question to see answer] We will start easy, what is your latest or upcoming Brava Bad Boy title? {EC Sheedy}: Still on the book shelves is BAYOU BAD BOYS—great stories by JoAnn Ross and Nancy Warren! And released in July ’06 was BAD BOYS SOUTHERN STYLE, and again I’m lucky with my book partners, the amazing JoAnn Ross and Jill Shalvis. I am not familiar with how anthologies get put together. Did you write the story to fit the 'bad boy' title or did your story get submitted and just happen to work into the 'bad boy' book? {EC Sheedy}: For me it’s been both. The BRAVA anthologies are the brainchild and a labor of love for one of the greatest editors a writer can have, Kate Duffy, Editorial director, at Kensington. She comes up with the theme for the books, and she asks the author to send in something that fits. I have to say Kate is very respectful of the writer’s take on what makes the story work. There are no hard and fast rules—other than us concocting as sinfully and seductive a romance as we can—with the accent on the romance. She likes the characters to fit, the sex to fit, and the ending to be happily believable. That’s the mission, should we choose to accept it. Do you read the finished book and is it hard to go back and read your own work after it is published? What bad boy tale would you recommend? {EC Sheedy}: No, I don’t read my finished books. I do glance at them, but really by the time they’ve been edited, and edited, and edited . . . and the final galleys approved, I’m done. Finito. It’s on to the next story, the next soon to be happy couple. As to what I’d recommend from the BAD BOYS collection of anthologies . . . well, all of them, of course. :) There is so much writing talent in the books, who can choose? If you could write/sell anything... any genre, any setting, any plot, what would it be? Have you already written it? {EC Sheedy}: I’d like to write The Da Vinci Code with some hot sex then wallpaper my bathroom in NYT listings. *g* But seriously, right now, my brain is a summertime, deadline-addled wasteland. After I finish the romantic suspense I’m working on, all I’ve got is a title to hang my writer’s hat on, CHAMPAGNE TASTE AND A BEER BODY. I’m hoping a story will flicker to life any day now. Anybody who’s got a great idea for a book, have at me. LOL What's Next? We are book whores give us names, dates and summaries! {EC Sheedy}: Up next for me is not a BAD BOYS title but it is a BRAVA; it’s romantic suspense and it will be out in March ’07. It’s titled WITHOUT A WORD. It’s dark—written by the flip side of me which has always seen monsters in the closet and imagined even worse—and it’s about murder, obsessive love (and sex) and not knowing who your friends really are.